How U.S. News Ranks Colleges

Webinar Transcription

Sam: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome. My name is Sam Day. I’m one of the former admissions officers, at CollegeAdvisor, and I’m gonna be your moderator today. Today’s webinar is a special session from US News on the Best Colleges 2027 list, and how US News ranks colleges. To orient everyone to our webinar timing, we will start with an introduction to our presenters, we’ll dive into a fantastic presentation.

I know that I’m excited to see, uh, what’ll be shared, and then we’ll end by opening the floor for a live Q&A. There won’t be any polls this time. On the sidebar, you can start submitting questions in the Q&A tab. We will not be using the chat feature for this webinar. Slides are also available under the Handouts tab.

Now, uh, we have two amazing presenters, and before we get started with the presentation, I would love to hear a little bit more, uh, from both of you. Eric Brooks and Jodi Go, uh, if you could give us a little bit about who you are, what you do at US News, and then [00:01:00] we are excited to hear your presentation.

Eric: So I’m Eric.

I have worked at US News since 2010 on the education rankings, and what I do is exactly what it sounds like. I work on, uh, data collection and analysis and methodology refinement and explaining the rankings among other, uh, assorted tasks.

Jodi: Hi, everyone. I’m Jodi. Very excited to be here. I lead the consumer product team here at U.S. News Education. Our product team specifically works on building those digital tools and product features that you see on the site that help students and families research schools and build their college list. So excited to talk to you guys today

Eric: All right. All right, I’m going to discuss a little about the, uh, college rankings, how we, uh, how we calculate them, uh, how they’re best to be [00:02:00] used, uh, toward the college search, and then we’ll hand over to Jodi to talk a little more about the, like, sort of next steps once you have list of schools to look at further and some of the tools that are on our website, and, uh, we’ll have plenty of time left for, for questions So a bit of a background.

If you’re attending this webinar, you’re probably either, uh, applying to college or know somebody who’s applying or, or deciding wh- where among places you’ve applied to go. Uh, I just wanna always give this background that, um, you know, what our goal of this as US News is to make the search more manageable.

Uh, we’re not the, the single answer. We don’t claim to be. But, um, even as there’s a lot of information, uh, on the internet and elsewhere, um, about the characteristics of colleges, it’s inconsistent. It can be difficult to compare. The, the source of information’s a lot of [00:03:00] places. So what we’re doing is we’re collecting information using the same definitions and publishing it on our profiles and assessing schools using a common methodology that we publish on our website.

And all of these things that are done, uh, with how we do the calculations are with students and, well, yeah, prospective students in mind, helping with that college decision, things that should, uh, matter to prospective students about the academic quality of the institutions. And when I’m working on the rankings, me and the people on my team, we have, uh, independence from the business operations.

We, we, we know the business people, we explain to the business people what’s changed with the methodology or what are some of the new data points. But ultimately, the way that we come about, uh, some of the change that I’m discussing about, uh, later, later in this presentation is us, uh, seeing what new data sources are available [00:04:00] and, uh, just refining the best way to evaluate what matters to students, uh, when, when selecting a college a- as US News has done for over forty years right now

The college search is important because, uh, despite all of the rhetoric sometimes about whether a college degree is worth it, the answer remains yes. Uh, just simply having a bachelor’s degree, um, when you look at everyone who’s earned a bachelor’s degree, there’s higher lifetime earnings, there’s higher employment.

Even when you control for other factors in- uh, involving the background of those students, there’s been countless studies in- indicating that. Um, students who complete a bachelor’s yet earn more than those who attend college but do, do not finish. Um, and graduation’s very important, which is why we put considerable weight on it.

Um, and, uh… [00:05:00] Yeah, so I guess that’s just a basically… There’s, there’s a data-driven point that getting a, a college degree is worth it. And certainly when we look at the rankings, we’re looking at school… Some of those higher ranked schools may, may have a higher return on investment or, or more of the students graduate.

But even outside the top of the rankings, uh, the outcomes for students who graduate, uh, most of, like, the colleges we rank are, are, are, are pretty positive if you look at how many earn more than a typical high school graduate. And we know ’cause we use that factor in our rankings, and it’s, it’s a majority of graduates at the vast majority of these institutions.

So when we put… do, do our analysis, uh, we, we think prospective students, they should consider academics and cost and likely outcomes together to determine which college is the best fit Right here is sort of the one-pager of our rankings calculations. It’s, [00:06:00] uh, or, or the ranking factors used in our calculations, I should say.

Uh, we explain each of these in great detail on usnews.com. You know, so if you’re really interested in, you know, what year we pulled the data and from what source and what gets divided by what, if you’re one of those, um, then, then you, you can knock your socks off looking at, uh, looking at usnews.com. I’d say the high-level description of this is we put about a little more than half of our rankings formula, a majority, on measures related to student outcomes.

Uh, those can be graduation rates. We look at them as an absolute value. We look at them, uh, controlling for, uh, student characteristics, ’cause achieving a higher grad rate can be more impressive if done with more students from, uh, low-income households. Um, we look, as, as mentioning this earlier, the percent of graduates who earn more than a typical high school graduate because we think eq- [00:07:00] what, regardless of what field of study someone wants to go to, chances are if they’re putting the time and investment of a four-year degree, they are looking to earn more than what a typical high school without college makes, which is about thirty-five grand a year.

Uh, and we’ve… and a new earnings by major factor that we’ve recently added. Uh, twenty percent of the formula is expert opinion by top school officials, presidents, provosts, and deans at schools, and they can capture intangibles about academic quality that may not be captured by the statistics alone. It may even be a proxy, uh, for people applying to graduate school, whether, you know, an undergraduate degree is held in high esteem by other academics We put 11% of the formula on faculty resources, uh, whe-whether it’s student-faculty ratio or the percent of faculty or full-time and how much they’re paid.

It’s an indicator of the ability for a school to have good labs or be able to support the faculty [00:08:00] and by extension, the students, uh, small class sizes and just a strong academic learning environment. Along those lines, we look at expenditures per student only on core spending. We don’t look at, uh, the, the lazy rivers or whatever else, but instruction and institutional support and academic services, uh, as well as five percent on SATs and ACTs, uh, for, for qualifying schools, uh, look at, um, attributes of the incoming class and their preparedness.

And for national universities only, we put four percent on the faculty research, which, uh, is a measure of, you know, how distinguished the faculty are and possible opportunities for upper– for undergraduates when they are juniors or seniors and may wanna be engaged in research or, or be, uh, in proximity to faculty who are highly renowned.

So the new ranking factor this year compares earnings within fields of [00:09:00] study. So how much a typical history major at a school earns compared to other history majors in their ranking, or, you know, chemical engineers to chemical engineers. In short, we’re not telling… We’re, we’re not trying to just rank a school by saying the best school is the one that has the most finance majors or, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever the most graduates pick the high-paying field.

I think the students, it’s self-selection to some degree, what people wanna study, what type of career they want. But by comparing within fields, we’re looking at the, uh, sort of what, what the institutional value is of, of the degree in whatever field students go to. And it is looked at only four years after graduation for employed federal graduates who took out, it says took out federal loans, but I would say actually who– or federal financial aids.

That also includes Pell Grant students and its highest awards a bachelor’s degree. So we’re not capturing everybody and, and that’s one [00:10:00] reason we only have five percent on the formula. It’s not that earnings is only five or ten percent of what matters in choosing a college, but there’s still, uh, limitations in terms of we’re not, we’re not capturing the whole picture, just looking at a subset of students and what they make, uh, four years after college if they didn’t go to grad school.

Nonetheless, still an important economic lens on the return on investment that a school provides. So when we crunch all those numbers, this is what we get. These are the top 10, uh, national universities. There’s actually about over 400 uni- national universities we ranked, but they wouldn’t all fit on the slide, so you’re getting 10 of them here.

All but one of these schools was in last year’s top 10. So when you, you know, read something that says there’s a lot of movement in the ranking, well, it’s true that number one and number two switch places. Um, and then within the– these, uh, nine… 11 schools, including ties, [00:11:00] there’s some small, small changes.

There’s some bigger changes when you go outside the top 10 because there’s more compression in the school’s data, meaning the schools are more similar to each other than different in the middle. Uh, nonetheless, it’s just worth having some perspective that each year, uh, the rankings are more similar to each other than they are different.

So what makes a top school a top school? Well, I just isolated here a few of the ranking factors, four of them to be exact, and we’re gonna look at national universities in the top forty and compare them to schools ranked forty-one to eighty. Um, looking at the entering class, the ACT scores and SAT scores, the median scores are higher among schools in the top forty than forty-one through eighty.

And I think this does– this probably even short sells it because the number of applicants or the share of applicants reporting [00:12:00] those scores is also higher. I think if you required an SAT, ACT for every applicant from both schools, the gap might be e-even a bit higher. So surprise– probably no surprise is the top-ranked schools are more selective.

Uh, student-faculty ratio is smaller, meaning probably the classes tend to be a bit smaller and, uh, you know, higher number of, uh, of, of faculty and full-time faculty. Uh, earnings versus category average, what those numbers mean, that’s SD is for standard deviation. Um, it’s, it’s a bit wonky, but the bottom line is compa– uh, the top forty schools are earning considerably more, their graduates, than what a typical student would earn, uh, in those, uh, when they– four years after college.

Within schools forty-one through eighty, still, um, because those are still highly ranked schools, the graduates still earn more than the typical college graduate. But obviously that those [00:13:00] huge earning premiums are not there as much because it’s really the top schools where graduates pipeline into some of the highest paying early career pro- uh, professions.

Um, and then ratings from school officials. I mentioned the intangibles, the, you know, the regard among academics. Uh, o-on a one to five scale, the top forty schools are four point three average rating and forty-one through eighty, three point five average rating. And that’s sort of capturing perception, which can matter when someone’s applying for a job.

It could also matter when someone’s applying to law school or medical school or if, you know, especially gonna work in academia or get a PhD. So we capture things in different ways and just generally across the board, um, the school’s that are on the top of the rankings tend to perform better on alm-almost all the indicators that we assess.

[00:14:00] Here’s a list. Uh, we do more than national universities. We also rank schools that have different academic missions, uh, or liberal arts colleges, schools, or schools that, um, they don’t have… They basically don’t have graduate students. There are not many graduate students. They are focused on undergraduate teaching and arts and sciences, whereas the national universities I mentioned, uh, have award doctorates and do research.

So among these schools, you- if you look at just these schools, you get a different result with, uh, Williams College, Amherst College, uh, those have been one and two for, for an awful long time. Um, and, and just some, you know, so some additional schools that, that for students who want a more undergraduate-focused environment, uh- Another ranking we do is our public school ranking.

It’s pretty much the same as our overall ranking if we only took the public schools and just, you know, did a ranking assort basically among them. So you can see the highest ranked public school in the United [00:15:00] States, there’s two of them, it’s UCLA and UC Berkeley, uh, which are both tied 20 overall, and they, they’ve been top for a while, and then University of Michigan and University of Virginia, UNC Chapel Hill

So what’s fun is we had a new ranking this year that’s looking at the best values for in-state students. So if you are curious how the, you know, if let’s say you’re considering, you know, a private school or the, a public school that’s like the flagship school in your state, and how good, how am I really getting a good value by going in state?

We’re looking 40% of the academic quality, which is basically the, the overall ranking performance, but three-fifths of it is looking at the tuition and fees and financial aid for in-based students, uh, and just generally the affordability once all the costs like food and housing and, and need-based aid, uh, are taken into [00:16:00] account.

Not to mention the baseline tuition fees for those who wouldn’t qualify for need-based aid. So loo- like looking at publics like that, we have to get a different order. Uh, University of North Caro… And this is a ranking that we published on our website for the first time this year. University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is number one.

Uh, their tuition and fees for in-state students is well under $10,000 a year. And they, you know, as I showed earlier, they were, I think, the fifth highest ranked by, on just our pure academic ranking. So when you put those two pieces together, the affordability and the academics, uh, they’re, they’re number one here.

And then, then there’s a few other schools that, uh, you know, University of Florida also, uh, one of the more affordable top academic schools, so they’re number three over there

In addition to that, we have all kinds of rankings depending upon interests. Uh, our best val– Well, I mentioned the Best Value School rankings, our HBC– [00:17:00] ranking of HBCUs, um, our Best College for Veterans ranking. That’s, like, looking at academic quality, but also giving schools extra points that they have good financial aid benefits for military veterans like, like GI Bill and Yellow Ribbon and so forth.

Um, and we also have some even more highly specialized rankings like, uh, study abroad programs that enhance student experience, include things like study abroad and senior capstones and writing experiences, um, and, and you just can go down the list, some, some additional specialization. We also specialize by discipline, so if you know you’re gonna or major in business or think you may major in business, we have, uh, undergraduate business rankings because depending upon what field you wanna study, that can greatly impact what the best choice for you is.

Um, a lot of the top-ranked national universities do not have undergraduate business degrees. Their business schools start when… in, in, [00:18:00] uh, at graduate school. So yeah. So also, you know, computer science, economics, engineering, nursing, psychology, um, different schools top each of these rankings, and they’re all bachelor’s level, uh, rankings.

So I, I mentioned earlier the difference between national universities and liberal arts colleges. We also do rankings that are regional universities and colleges. They get more of their students from local, and they tend to, you know, have different characteristics on their degree mixes, more professional-focused degrees.

So more like being, you know, a dental hygienist than, you know, a philosophy major, more practical training. But they’re still four-year degrees. So this year, we do something that we only do once every handful of years, and that is we reassess which schools place in which [00:19:00] category, like whether they’re a national university or a liberal arts college.

And because the framework that we base it off of, called the Carnegie Classifications, changed how they group schools to be more granular, our following of that framework resulted in seventeen percent of schools changing categories. Um, so any of those schools, if a school is a national liberal arts college and now is a national university, we– I always advise don’t compare the rank year to year ’cause they’re completely different peer groups of schools.

Um, but even for schools that remained in their category, especially those in the– that aren’t at the top, that are in the middle or lower down, some of where they’re, they place this year has to be put in the context of the schools that entered and the schools that left. If, if seventeen percent of your peer group changes, um, that can have a modest impact on the rankings.

We kept each group similar in size, so it’s not usually a single explanatory [00:20:00] reason, but, but it does add some volatility in addition to the new ranking factor I mentioned this year that, uh, wouldn’t exist in a year where we didn’t change categories.

So once we publish the rankings, there are good ways to use the rankings, and there are, uh, not so great ways to use the rankings. I would strongly encourage prospective students to look at them earlier in the process to build a shortlist of institutions that fit academically, to not just look at the rank, but also, you know, look through our web pages and learn more about the underlying data that contributed to the rank, and information that is personalized about, you know, what athletics and clubs are offered and, and, and just, you know, it’s just sort of the vibes of the campus.

And we, we try to– And we get– we clip, publish, uh, user reviews on our websites. We have financial aid data, and a lot of the information is, uh, [00:21:00] richer and more detailed than what most of the information you’re gonna find on other websites is because we collect it directly from schools. So we’re not just, uh, posting information that the Department of Education collects.

We go much further. Um, and, and don’t… I’m not saying you should only spend all your time on our site. Of course, you should talk with your students or, or, or, um, you know, not with your students, but other students who went to the schools, vi-visit the campus, uh, and just sort of get a sense by any means possible whether, uh, the institution you’re considering is the place you wanna spend four years of your life.

Um, do not overly focus on whether your school changed a few places in rank. Uh, I, I did an analysis one year that was oftentimes when a school dropped by just a few places, it was likely to rise a few places the next year if they were to drop again. So, you know, we do, we do like national universities. I [00:22:00] said four hundred and twenty schools.

So the difference between the school ranked seventy-five and seventy-nine out of four hundred and twenty, uh, you can do the math. Not, not so big And don’t compare rankings across categories. I mentioned that earlier. It’s, it’s different, it, it’s different peer groups, so just don’t. Um, with, with that said, I’m going to turn it over to Jodi to, uh, discuss a little more about turning our information into a college search.

Jodi: Thanks, Eric. Always great to hear you share, you know, the latest insights behind the rankings. So like Eric mentioned, while rankings are a great starting point for your search, it shouldn’t be the only thing that you rely on when you decide where to apply or to enroll. So when families visit US News, looking at a ranking list usually is step one, right?

But the college search process isn’t about chasing the number one school, it’s about finding the place where you’ll actually thrive [00:23:00] academically, socially, and financially. So looking at this slide, you can really break down the college search journey down into three simple stages, and that’s discovering your options, doing a deeper dive, and staying organized.

So let’s kind of walk through how to turn these, this rankings information into a college search at US News. So first, discovery and search. Once you’ve scanned the main rankings list to see what’s out there, you’ll want to narrow down schools based on what actually matters to you. You can use our advanced filters or our A- our AI search tool to ask straightforward questions in plain English.

If you’re at the very beginning stage of your search and you’re feeling a bit stuck about where to look, we have a couple college match quizzes that will ask you a few quick questions to help build a starting list based on your actual preferences that fit you. That brings us to step two, research and evaluation.

This is [00:24:00] where you move past those surface level details. On our school profile pages, we provide tons of data and insights, like Eric mentioned, where you can closely look at metrics like percent of graduates by major, starting salary by major, all the way to what sports clubs or organizations are part of campus life.

Our admissions calculator tool lets you plug in your GPA and test scores to see how you stack up against other applicants for a specific school. And when you’re trying to choose between a few top contenders on your list, we also have a side-by-side comparison tool that allows you to compare up to twenty-five schools at once in a single view.

So you aren’t jumping between, you know, te- twenty different open tabs. I know we’ve all been there before, so this tool will really help you kind of stay organized in one view And finally, step three is about staying organized during the whole search process. [00:25:00] So as you research schools on the US News site, you can save schools as you go.

They’ll automatically save to your own account dashboard, so this serves as a one centralized place to track schools you’ve bookmarked or scholarships that you’ve saved in our scholarship finder tool, which currently has more than 20,000 scholarships to choose from. So lastly, you’ll… We also have, you know, expert guides on US News that cover every topic you’ll hit along the way.

For example, how to make sense of financial aid offers, plan campus visits, and even prepare for tests. So to close out, um, I welcome you back to check out our best colleges rankings that just launched literally yesterday. So feel free to use that as a starting point in your college search alongside the tools that I just walked through right now.

I’ll pass it back to you, Sam.

Sam: Great. I wanna thank you both for an amazing presentation. [00:26:00] With that, we’re gonna move into the Q&A portion of the night. And to our lovely audience, I would love to see y’all be a little bit more active in submitting some of the questions on the Q&A, but no fear, I do have a couple of pre-prepared while those start to trickle in One of the first questions that, uh, came from the group that pre-submitted their questions, uh, when they registered was the question of AI.

How has AI changed the way that these rankings are done, and how do you see AI changing the way that rankings are done in the future? And if I misinterpreted their question, they might’ve been wondering what does AI mean for rankings, period?

Eric: How has AI impact how they’re done? I’m sure this is not what they’re talking about, but, uh, to be tongue in cheek on this, uh, it certainly is nice after we write some code to be able to run it by AI for, for a second set of eyeballs on, on [00:27:00] everything or to help debug things. Um, if it means in terms of the broader college search, uh, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that just like before AI, when you were on Google, you couldn’t like find the whole college rankings on Google.

So if you just look in AI and you ask for like the US News College rankings, it might… I’m, I’m not saying that AIs don’t scrape certain things, but it’ll be incomplete or out of date or just wrong or con-conflate us with five different rankers. Um, you know, you know how AI is. It’ll tell you of course, that the, you know, school X or school Y is very good at A, B and C, but, but you already knew that.

Um, what you don’t know necessarily is, you know, what, what our rankings were and, and all the underlying information that’s specific to them that we, uh, publish on our website[00:28:00]

Sam: All right. Thank you. Um, jumping off something that you had just mentioned, of the five, uh, other lists that may be out there, what makes US News different from some of the other ranking sources that are out there? Um, when students are looking at these rankings, are certain ranking lists better for certain topics?

Or, you know, how do you view the other lists that are out there, and how do you recommend students understand what makes… why they should be choosing US News? Because, you know, obviously It’s definitely has the reputation that it does for a reason.

Eric: Yeah. Well, you asked, uh, how are we different from the others, and clearly we’re, we’re the best.

No, I mean, we’re measuring different things. We’re measuring different things. Ours, as I sort of mentioned during my slides, is, is very academic focused. So we’re not gonna say s- a school is better than another because, [00:29:00] uh, you know, the campus environment, everyone goes to watch the football game on Saturday.

We think that’s a very, you know, personalized choice, and we try to convey some of that information in our profiles. But all those ranking factors I mentioned, whether it’s SATs or faculty resources or whatever else, are focusing on what’s broadly important to prospective students, which is, is this a good, uh, academic school where I’m gonna learn and be prepared for a, a career and hopefully even make some money afterward?

And the other ones are measuring different things. Some of them are measuring sort of, uh, you know, so- sociological c- uh, contributions or some of them are just saying, you know, earnings should be the entire formula of theirs or most of their formula. Uh, you know, we, we tackle things on many different ways because we know completion matters, we know earning matters, we know, uh, learning matters, we know opportunities, [00:30:00] uh, for graduate school and, and, and, uh, research matter.

So that’s, you know, the rankings are what we measure and we, we think we have the, uh, best formulas using the most current data and most relevant data, uh, for those assessments.

Sam: Okay. Thank you. A follow-up question on a very different vein, but one of… Again, a question that was submitted by the audience prior to the webinar.

And to my audience out there net- watching now, I would love for you to hear what y’all are worried about and what y’all are interested in knowing more of in the Q&A. Um, but this was a question that was asked by one of our pre-submitted, uh, lists, and that is, how does alumni giving factor into the rankings, um, and is legacy status considered at all in any way in these rankings as you all are looking at the various data points that you consider?

Eric: Well, if this was twenty fifteen, alumni giving would contribute [00:31:00] about five percent to the formula. Uh, today, and for the last several years, we do not- Uh, use alumni giving at all in the rankings calculations. We, we collect the information, still publish it if people are interested or if you’re a school looking to do benchmarking with, with the past.

Um, but it is no longer part of the formula. Legacy is definitely not part of the formula. Never has been. What’s in the formula are, you know, measures I’ve, I’ve mentioned already about the, the academic environment.

Sam: That’s a really interesting point that you made, that in twenty fifteen that would’ve been part of the formula.

What causes the methodology in the formula to change?

Eric: Mm-hmm. Well, one thing that causes the formula to change is access to new data sources. Uh, the earnings by major, um, information I mentioned earlier, that’s information that didn’t exist when I started [00:32:00] working at US News. It’s released by the Department of Education with data on federal aid recipients, ’cause they, they coordinate with the IRS a- about s- and they know of these people who receive federal aid, uh, from their, from their records, what, uh, what their earnings are.

And, um, we started using it in the formula, in part because return on investment we know is, uh, increasingly important to prospective students. It’s always been important, but, but now more than ever. Um, and that data happens to now be part of federal law, uh, when they, you know, under the big beautiful bill.

One of the things they did in it was amended the Higher Education Act, which sort of create a statutory requirement for basically the, the, the federal, the, the executive branch to collect and publish, uh, s- these types of earnings data. So we know it, it’s, uh, it, it should be durable. So that’s one example.

Just a, a quicker other example though is about a decade ago, [00:33:00] uh, schools were collecting information on the graduation rates of Pell students, and that hadn’t been available to us before, and that gave a… allowed us to measure something that probably we’d have liked to have measured earlier but didn’t have information on, which is how well they’re, uh, serving students who are from, you know, lower income backgrounds, which is not only important for lower income students, but is a measure of, I’d say, the overall engagement and, uh, you know, s- academic strength and support that a school has if even lower propensity students are, um, staying enrolled and completing their degrees.

So yeah, I guess to, to sum that up, it’s as, as new– we, we change the methodology as priorities from students and families change, and as new data sources become available. And sometimes if a data source used to be available is no longer available, uh, we [00:34:00] may take it out of the rankings. We used to… We used for years graduate indebtedness for the last several years, and it’s, it’s stale.

It hadn’t been, uh, updated by the Department of Education. So that’s one reason why, uh, it, it wasn’t in this year’s formula

Sam: Okay. And I can guess what the answer will be based on the way that you just answered that question, but how often does the methodology change? Is it something that’s updated yearly or what are the sort of review cycles for methodology with the changes in information happen?

Eric: So we try to make the rankings more similar than different year to year. It doesn’t serve anybody if how we assess a school is just, uh, or whether a school moved up and down the rankings from one year to the next is about us and not, not telling anything about the school. Um, even this year where there was a little more change than the last couple of years, [00:35:00] 95% of the formula was the same, and consequently, the ranking results were relatively similar.

So I’d say the majority of years, we don’t introduce a new ranking factor, remove a ranking factor, but we do… I- I- it’s not, it’s not a rarity for something like that to happen. And while it does put ourselves a little more into the equation of, of why a school change in rank, I think we owe it to students searching for a school for us to use the latest and best and most relevant data that are available to us, uh, in comparing schools.

Uh, I, I don’t think we’d be serving students well if we didn’t look at this new earnings data just to have, you know, greater continuity with last year’s rankings.

Sam: Yeah. Thank you. Looking at the Q&A question that we’ve just gotten from Carly Chen, for US News rankings, do you put international students data as part of the resources you’ve used when producing the rankings?

And how do [00:36:00] international students fit into the formula, uh, when producing the Best College?

Eric: Mm-hmm. Well, we don’t do any ranking factors that isolate international students. So if we’re looking at six-year graduation rates of students or student faculty ratios of students, uh, international students are just, you know, indistinguishable from anyone else.

Uh, what we do have for international students, we do publish sorted lists. They’re not rankings, but lists that, uh, highlight schools that have enrolled the high- highest shares of international students if it, if it’s important to, you know, attend a school where, where, uh, someone who’s an international student is, is not alone.

Uh, we also collect information and publish on our profiles involving application deadlines, uh, English language test exam requirements, uh, if applicable, um, [00:37:00] acceptance rates and, and other statistics and, and that are important to, um, international students applying for college

Sam: I’m assuming one of those statistics might also be scholarships.

That was the sort of second half of the question that was submitted

Eric: Yeah, we– I’m trying to remember everything exactly we collect. Maybe Jodi knows more ab-about scholarships, but we definitely have… We definitely publish on the profiles certain information about financial aid, um, specific to non-resident students as well as, uh, in-state and out-of-state students, and just the whole, the whole student body if it’s a private school.

Sam: Yeah. I do wanna take a moment and say thank you for all the work that you’ve done. I worked in international admissions for my time, uh, my tenure as an admissions officer, and so I know that it was always a top resource that I would recommend so students could get a better understanding of what was out there.

Um, so speaking from personal experience, I do wanna say thank you for all the work that you all put into that.

Eric: [00:38:00] Yeah.

Sam: One thing that I did notice, and I noticed this on some of the slides as well, is you mentioned tie. What exactly does a tie mean for, uh, the Best, Best of list?

Eric: I’m sorry, you said t-i-m-e?

Sam: T-i-e.

Tie.

Eric: Oh, oh, tie. A tie is, it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s, uh, the two schools have the same score. We, we give schools a score of zero to a hundred. Mm-hmm. And, and we don’t… It, it’s integers, you know, one, two, three, four, five. So national universities, there’s four hundred and thirty schools. So you do the math.

There’s gonna be some schools sharing a score. Yeah. Uh, and there was a decision made a long time ago that rather than try to split hairs and give every school its own rank, even if the differences were statistically negligible, we instead decided to put schools on [00:39:00] a zero to a hundred scale so that schools that were very similar were listed as a tie rather than…

Yeah, so that, that they’d be listed as a tie.

Sam: Okay. Moving on to a different metric that you all, that you all have mentioned today, the peer assessment. That is, if I remember right, about 20% of the total ranking.

Eric: Mm-hmm.

Sam: You mentioned deans and other faculty, but who exactly, you know, if you’re allowed to share or, you know, more broadly speaking, who typically is surveyed and how are those respondents selected?

Eric: Hmm. They are the president, the provost, and the dean of admissions. So those three contacts are surveyed at each institution we rank. And we, you know, in order to find them, we … If… Hopefully a lot of schools, we, we know them from last year and we, we email those contacts. But we actually, uh, there’s, there’s people on my team [00:40:00] who send a, a contact verification survey to schools to say, “Okay, who’s, who’s the dean?

Who’s the, you know, president, provost? What email should they go to?” Um, among, among other information we collect from schools before we collect the information used in the rankings. But it i- it is the top officials at the schools, um, who are giving the ratings of their peer schools on, on over academic quality from one to five on a scale of marginal to outstanding.

And, uh, you’d be surprised how stable those average ratings are, despite sometimes different respondents from different schools submitting the ratings each year. Um, there really is, I guess, a general sense of, um, how, how, you know, the academic strength and, and distinguish of the faculty and quality of graduates at these institutions among, uh, among other academics[00:41:00]

Sam: How does impartiality play into that? Knowing, knowing academics, some of them can have very strong opinions. How does impartiality play a role in those peer, uh, peer review decisions that are, that are made then?

Eric: Well, the peer survey is anonymous. Um, we don’t know how each school rates another school, but, um, I think the schools are spending maybe…

I don’t know how long it takes to do the peer survey, but it’s gotta take at least a half hour out of… And they’re– these are busy people. These are top school officials. So I don’t think… In, in some– and, and some of, some of them are also, you know, uh, know of people, leaders at some of these other schools.

They network with them. So I think they’re doing it in good faith. Just like there’s not a lot of voter fraud, I don’t think there’s a lot… I think, I think people who are doing these peer surveys are, are doing them earnestly. Um, and that’s… If they weren’t, we wouldn’t see such stability in the [00:42:00] average rating received, uh, from, from year to year, uh, for schools.

And we also tell them, uh, in the survey instructions, if you’re not familiar with the school, don’t nominate it, and most schools do not nominate, uh, do not, do not… I should say, don’t rate it. Most, most respondents don’t rate all, you know, four hundred and thirty national universities or, or however many there are in, in the other, uh, ranking categories that we assess.

Sam: Okay. Thank you. I am going to take a quick moment, give our presenters a pause, uh, to talk about who we are and what we do here at CollegeAdvisor. Everything we’ve talked about tonight is exactly what our team thinks about, um, potentially in a different capacity, but definitely something that’s on our minds as well.

And so we love to get to hear these presentations. I know many of my colleagues are… were excited for this presentation tonight because we know that it matters to the students. CollegeAdvisor has guided more than ten thousand families through the [00:43:00] college admissions process. Our team is made up of two hundred plus admissions experts and former admissions officers like myself.

So our team knows ex- what it actually takes to get that acceptance letter. In the class of twenty twenty-six alone, one in three Ivy League applicants were admitted to at least one Ivy League school, and two in three applicants applying to top twenty-five schools were accepted to one or more. If you’re interested in getting more information about CollegeAdvisor, you can scan the QR code to set up a one-on-one advising session with one of our amazing experts who can potentially help you figure out if CollegeAdvisor is gonna be the right choice for you.

That QR code will stay on the screen as we move into the final portion of our Q&A

Moving back to the Q&A, one of the things that I found really interesting that you mentioned is that you do distinguish the way that universities are using money. Some goes to the students, obviously, and some goes to that lovely lazy river, uh, out back or in the [00:44:00] athletic center. How do you distinguish between the school’s resources and the ability for it to use those resources effectively?

Or to put it another way, how do you avoid looking at the spending on the lazy river?

Eric: Yeah. See, it’s always the lazy river or the climbing wall that, uh … I, I always find that n- not, not so important when you have these schools with, uh, thirty thousand students and, and this is like a drop in the bucket of everything that it costs to run a school is, is having, having a big pool.

But, um, yeah, I mean, when, when the schools do report to the government, uh, expenditures, the definitions are very complicated about what counts in what bucket. So instruction is a bucket, and academic support is a bucket. And then there are things in other buckets, like auxiliary or athletics, um, that are not, uh, in those w- in those core functional expenditure [00:45:00] buckets.

So we don’t measure every dollar that the school spends. We’re, we’re only measuring dollars in fields that have relation to the, the academic environment at the school, and lazy rivers would not be one of them.

Sam: Speaking from, uh, someone who worked at a university that definitely had a climbing wall, and I- we may have had a lazy river, that was definitely very interesting to hear

Eric: My, my public high school had a climbing wall.

I don’t, it’s just not that… They’re at kids’ birthday parties. But, but yeah, yeah. I know.

Sam: Looking at the financial aid data for a moment, uh, you know, you mentioned that the post-graduation debt factor is no longer available. Um, but we also know that, you know, affordability is a large concern for students around the world, um, many of whom are getting ready for this process of applying to college.

What trends have [00:46:00] you noticed in, over the course of your tenure working on, uh, on these rankings in scholarships and aid, and how would you say, purely anecdotally without any numbers in front of you, that’s impacted scores?

Eric: Hmm. It’ll be much easier with numbers in front of me. But, um-

Sam: Yeah. If-

Eric: What I can tell you is…

Look, definitely in the twen- in the late 2000s, early 2010s, think I’m getting the dates right, the, the cost of tuition, uh, tuition was just skyrocketing. Everything got more expensive. And now a lot of schools aware of the, you know, price sensitivity, especially public schools, have frozen tuition or at least kept, uh, you know, the prices with, with, with inflation.

But just like with the, you know, economic debate in politics, it’s like, you know, people get mad at inflation even if, even if inflation has stopped. It’s, it’s an academic argument when you’re, when you’re paying a lot more for something than what it [00:47:00] used to be. And every parent knows, you know, they know what they paid for a college and what, what’s being, uh, what it costs to send their kid to college, and there’s a huge difference.

So, um, you know, financial aid has been, you know, catered to sort of to deal with that. And, uh, during, you know, the pandemic, the, the federal government gave a lot of money to, you know, to help schools and, uh, you know, some of that, that has, has dried out a bit. But, uh, it, it really depends just upon the school.

There’s some schools with a huge price discrimination policy where there’ll be a very expensive, you know, sticker price, but then generous financial aid. And then there’s other schools that are more, uh, you know, focused on keeping the baseline tuition low, but might not be, uh, as generous with need-based aid.

So it’s very, um, very school specific. We… You know, in terms of the trends in financial aid, um, one thing is I do, we do also publish on usnews.com, we didn’t mention this, or, you know, we have, uh, [00:48:00] journalists, staff writers who write about trends in our data, including how tuition’s changed over years and, and I think maybe even financial aid.

So I think our website, among other, uh, places, would be a good resource, uh, to find that information

Sam: Yeah. Thank you for that. I am going to flag that I have two more questions left. Uh, if you are in the audience and wanna add any questions, I welcome you to do so, but we might end a little bit early, um, uh, depending on how many questions come in from the audience.

I wanna be mindful of your time, and I wanna once again thank you both for the time that you’ve shared. And now onto the, the final two questions

As rankings continue to change, as factors go in and out, you have mentioned that they do tend to stay relatively stable, but that if one year something goes down, it may come back. You know, there may, there is always some fluctuation, is the way that I’ll choose to word that. How concerned should [00:49:00] applicants or other members of the audience, be they admissions counselors, parents, or fancier school officials, uh, be worried about the changes in ranking year on year?

Eric: I think the schools should, you know, their main focus should be serving, serving their students and, and providing good education and if they’re a university, doing research. Because we’re just measuring the things that matter to those students. So, you know, they can… A school can always say, “Oh, I wanna do better in ranking.

We’re gonna invest in this or invest in that.” But it is a bit like squeezing a balloon because, you know, we’re, we’re capturing so many different, different things. If they spend all their resources on, on the faculty and not the students, they’d go up in one factor and down in another factor. So just the, the general, the general thi- things that we measure, high graduation rates, smaller classes, good resources, uh, you know, [00:50:00] faculty being published a lot.

The, the things that are universally important. If the schools work in that direction, then the rankings will move in their direction too, over time.

Sam: Okay. Thank you. Finally, and this is going to be a question for both of you, it is very rare that we get to hear … And I will preface this by saying that this is going to be a bit of, bit of an oddball question to end on a high note.

Eric: Yeah.

Sam: It is very rare that we get to hear from someone in your shoes who both of you have very interesting careers. What is your favorite part of getting to work with US News and your favorite part of the job that you do?

Eric: Why don’t you go first, Jodi?

Jodi: I can go first. My favorite part of the job is we build tools that students and families use every day to make their college decisions.

So very exciting to kind of see, like, what I walk through between the rankings. We just have the whole entire toolbox to help students and families get, get [00:51:00] there. So that’s my favorite part of it

Eric: Um, it’s funny, I was like-

Jodi: Mm-hmm …

Eric: at a retirement party earlier today and saw some old, old faces and, uh, you know, had, had been at US News 16 years, and it was

I was getting, “What, what’s kept you there?” So I’m gonna tell you the same answer I was telling them, which is kind of, I, I think it’s fun that it’s … that people care. Uh, it makes every launch period s- very stressful. We get a lot of questions from schools and, uh, you know, it’d be, it’d be probably more relaxed every night before the rankings came out if, uh, if, if no one looked at them.

But it, but it is- Mm-hmm … you know, it, it, it’s, it’s, it’s gratifying people care, and it’s, it’s c- gratifying that I’m working in a data-driven way to help, uh, you know, inform decisions. I mean, if, if it’s not clear enough, I’m, I’m kind of a quantitative person, so, uh, anything I can do to contribute to, uh, more, uh, data literate decision-making, even if it’s through, [00:52:00] uh, the vessel of, of slapping a ranking to a bunch of schools and, uh, I

Yeah, I f- I find it very interesting, and it’s, it’s one reason I’ve been around a while.

Sam: Thank you both for sharing that, and thank you both for the work that you do to support the students and the families that are making these important decisions. We had one f- final question sneak in under the wire from our Q&A, and I wanna be, uh, grateful for the fact that we have the audience participation tonight.

When you’re looking at applications to med school, law school, or these other post-graduate institutions- How should they be taking rankings into consideration, not just considering their immediate future, but some of their longer term goals?

Eric: So you mentioned medical school and law school. I mean, uh, of course, we, we rank, uh, medical schools and, uh, law schools. I think there’s some tools on our website, I don’t know if Joni knows that, that sort of help identify which, which schools feed into other, uh, [00:53:00] f-feed, uh, into other graduate schools. But generally speaking, as I mentioned earlier, um, you know, admissions for graduate school are done by academics.

So, uh, in terms of, you know, why, why does where I go to get a college degree, uh, matter? Well, you know, if you’re gonna be a plumber, you can make a lot of money and probably, you know, where, where… If you got a four-year degree, where you did doesn’t really matter as long as you’re, you’re good at being a plumber.

Uh, if you’re gonna go and do graduate school and you have plans to have a career in academia as research or to go to a top law school, which is, uh, sometimes, you know, most advantageous if you wanna get a JD required job or get into a medical school where these acceptance rates are, are very ti- like, single digit acceptance rates, it’s good to have, uh, a strong undergraduate transcript that, uh, includes, um, you know, having attended, uh, an in-demand school where there’s a reputation for academic rigor[00:54:00]

Sam: All right. Once again, I wanna say thank you both so much for your time. I know it’s a late evening, at the very least on the East Coast, and so I wanna say thank you so much for your time, your insight, and your presentation. With that, we will be ending just a little bit early. Thank you all to the audience members.

Once again, thank you to our presenters. And with that, have a wonderful night!